Finance:Litecoin

Litecoin
Official Litecoin logo
Denominations
Plural	Litecoins
Symbol	Ł
Ticker symbol	LTC
Precision	10−8
Subunits
​1⁄1000	millilitecoin, mŁ
​1⁄1000000	microlitecoins, photons, μŁ
Development
Original author(s)	Charlie Lee
Initial release	0.1.0 / 7 October 2011 (2011-10-07)
Latest release	0.18.1 / 11 June 2020 (2020-06-11)
Code repository	github.com/litecoin-project/litecoin
Development status	Active
Project fork of	Bitcoin
Written in	C++
Operating system	Windows, OS X, Linux, Android
Developer(s)	Litecoin Core Development Team
Source model	Open source
License	MIT License
Ledger
Timestamping scheme	Proof-of-work
Hash function	scrypt
Block reward	12.5 LTC (approximately till August 2023), halved approximately every four years
Block time	2.5 minutes
Circulating supply	66,752,615 LTC (20 August 2021)
Supply limit	84,000,000 LTC
Valuation
Exchange rate	US$178 (August 2021)
Market cap	US$11.9 billion (August 2021)

Litecoin (LTC or Ł) is a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency and open-source software project released under the MIT/X11 license. Litecoin was an early bitcoin spinoff or altcoin, starting in October 2011. In technical details, Litecoin is nearly identical to Bitcoin.

History

By 2011, Bitcoin mining was largely performed by GPUs. This raised concern in some users that mining now had a high barrier to entry, and that CPU resources were becoming obsolete and worthless for mining. Using code from Bitcoin, a new alternative currency was created called Tenebrix (TBX). Tenebrix replaced the SHA-256 rounds in Bitcoin's mining algorithm with the scrypt function, which had been specifically designed in 2009 to be expensive to accelerate with FPGA or ASIC chips. This would allow Tenebrix to have been "GPU-resistant", and utilize the available CPU resources from bitcoin miners. Tenebrix itself was a successor project to an earlier cryptocurrency which replaced Bitcoin's issuance schedule with a constant block reward (thus creating an unlimited money supply). However, the developers included a clause in the code that would allow them to claim 7.7 million TBX for themselves at no cost, which was criticized by users. To address this, Charlie Lee, a Google employee who would later become Engineering Director at Coinbase, created an alternative version of Tenebrix called Fairbrix (FBX). Litecoin inherits the scrypt mining algorithm from Fairbrix, but returns to the limited money supply of Bitcoin, with other changes.

Lee released Litecoin via an open-source client on GitHub on October 7, 2011. The Litecoin network went live on October 13, 2011.

It was a source code fork of the Bitcoin Core client, differing primarily by having a decreased block generation time (2.5 minutes), increased maximum number of coins, different hashing algorithm (scrypt, instead of SHA-256), and a slightly modified GUI.

During the month of November 2013, the aggregate value of Litecoin experienced massive growth which included a 100% leap within 24 hours.

In May 2017, Litecoin became the first of the top 5 (by market cap) cryptocurrencies to adopt Segregated Witness. Later in May of the same year, the first Lightning Network transaction was completed through Litecoin, transferring 0.00000001 LTC from Zürich to San Francisco in under one second.

In September 2021, a fake press release was published on GlobeNewswire announcing a partnership between Litecoin and Walmart. This caused the price of Litecoin to increase by around 30%, before the press release was revealed as a hoax.

Differences from Bitcoin

Litecoin is different in some ways from Bitcoin:

• The Litecoin Network aims to process a block every 2.5 minutes, rather than Bitcoin's 10 minutes. This allows Litecoin to confirm transactions much faster than Bitcoin.
• Litecoin uses scrypt in its proof-of-work algorithm, a sequential memory-hard function requiring asymptotically more memory than an algorithm which is not memory-hard.

Due to Litecoin's use of the scrypt algorithm, FPGA and ASIC devices made for mining Litecoin are more complicated to create and more expensive to produce than they are for Bitcoin, which uses SHA-256.

When it comes to Litecoin as a method of payment, in early days there was correlation to Bitcoin in terms of extended payment patterns. Although one might assume that payment patterns of Litecoin would converge to Bitcoin, it has been found that there is little correlation of the payment patterns of Litecoin vs Bitcoin today, and these patterns continue to diverge over time.

See also

• List of scrypt crypto currencies